Sony Developing ‘Slender Man’ Movie, Pretty Much Asking For It

LAS VEGAS, NV - APRIL 12: Chairman of Sony Picture Entertainment Motion Pictures Group Tom Rothman speaks onstage during CinemaCon 2016 An Evening with Sony Pictures Entertainment: Celebrating the Summer of 2016 and Beyond at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace during CinemaCon, the official convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners, on April 12, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for CinemaCon)

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Of the many horrifying bits of Internet apocrypha—the fabled blue waffle, “Gangnam Style,” Ted Cruz’s campaign for the American presidency—none is more fearsome than that of the Slender Man. Legend has it that a tall, slim, faceless figure clad in a plain grey suit stalks children who have wandered away from their parents in the dead of night. Online tall tales place him in darkened forests and abandoned city streets from coast to coast, but a 2014 incident in which two Wisconsin pre-teens stabbed a classmate to impress the Slender Man was, regrettably, all too real. The victim survived and has since made a full recovery, but that headline-grabbing incident still made the Slender Man mythos into an overnight sensation, but the bad kind.

The New York Times reports that Sony has now made moves to capitalize on this freaky urban legend with a feature film based around the Slender Man character, having piggybacked on the intellectual property rights—acquired from, ostensibly, the entire Internet—through the distributor’s past collaborator Mythology Entertainment. (Sony fronted the Mythology production Truth last year.) Sony’s Screen Gems genre offshoot looks to partner with Mythology to do this up right, aiming for a production start this fall. The licensing deal extends far beyond the realm of movies, opening up a whole terrifying universe of Slender Man-themed fun, including video games, television, publishing, and beyond.

The Sony executives pushing for this deal seem to have failed to take one crucial detail into consideration, however. This is practically a guarantee that all involved parties will get the bejesus haunted right out of them. Frankly, it sounds like a more compelling picture than the impending Slender Man movie: drunk with hubris and probably also alcohol, headstrong studio executives decide to mount a film based on an online wives’ tale, only to find themselves drawn into the very nightmare they’re fictionalizing. Think about it, when‘s the last time anyone saw the producers of The Ring, or Videodrome? This is a tragedy waiting to happen.